Large organisation adopting social mediums, who thrive while sharing before the social tools, tend to become avid representatives of the Enterprise 2.0 and social workplace, those companies usually harvest value out of the social workplace and introduction of a digital means to extend their natural work process.
One of the best example is Deloitte and the Yammer love affair, Accountancy consultants share information to survive, they are a co-organism that just got extended with the services of yammer.
Wouldn’t it be great if this was the case for any company? presenting the tools, educating the people and bang we hit the gold vein of the social workplace era.
Sadly this isn’t the case, we have to understand that we are not at the stage where companies are ruled by the social generation. Employees do not fully understand the value of information sharing, and in some cases regard information sharing as a loss of job security.
Pondering about this for a while i though, how can we then promote the use of the social workplace in organisations?
One of the methods is to expose the non users to the users, making the public know about the small groups of people who produce value from the social workplace.
There are probably multiple ways of doing so and i cant even imagine all of them but the one i think will create create value and help in exposing the network is Digital Curation.
Digital Curation is similar to the curation of the art in the museum, a selection of the best “Content”, based on predefined criteria representing the company business and culture, are selected and maintained in a shared location. These items are catalogued (Tags, Categories etc.) and indexed for quick find.
This curated content is transmitted through common medium in the organisation with the aim to expose and educate.
What i envision is the exposure of the company through email to a curated valuable set of snippets and links from the social workplace.
This will get some inquisitive people the small push to discover what was going on.
It will expose the tools without the fluff, only the stuff.
But most importantly it will give the value to the people and the best reaction can be a conversion due to a mishap, “If only i had this info yesterday” type. A person who relises the work related value of the Enterprise 2.0 is going to be hooked and become the best advocator.
This is not to replace an appropriate education to the system but more to enhance that with sharing the current experience on this new tool, teasing people to join the crowd.
If we can change the peoples perceived value of the new tool then it will get its proper place.
But this is the side benefit of curation, the main benefit is that curation will enable a timeline representation of the value from the network and will enable the curator to then report of the value increase or decrease as it appears in the network.
This monitoring of the social workplace and the deeper metrics it represent will enable a better monitoring on the networks value production.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Yuval Ararat

I am a bit shocked from release processes in the last few weeks and cannot hold back the feeling.
I am a supporter of release fast release often but there is a bit of a stretch named “Within Reason”, if your application size is 30Mb and you release every 3 days the commitment is, how do i say it gently, over demanding.
release within a reason is a bit like resisting the developer urge to just throw all the new magnificent features that are hot out of the testing oven and giving them to the customer. its a noble thing to do, but it has its price.
Making a person update regularly is one thing but annoying them with multiple updates makes a regularly updating customer to a deferring update customer, its like a nagging kid, the more updates there are the less you feel they are important and deserver your attention.

Another thing i noticed lately is developers putting release notes, this harms the product and should be done by the product manager. why do i say this? look at the following example from prezi desktop.

Crop images and pdf’s by double clicking on them.
Draw straight lines, bend arrows, and manipulate them much easier.
Application starts much faster.

This is agonizingly not commercial and lacks the sales pitch, we need to make the client feel the love we spread. a person reading this will think, who is running this company? how is this allowed out? what does this reflect on my information security and the way things are managed?
Yes i know that these days with the Sony fiasco there are claims that even well managed companies are not that well managed. and security is just a matter of luck.

Looking at iTunes release notes you get the feeling they know what they are doing

iTunes 10.2.2 provides a number of important bug fixes, including:

• Addresses an issue where iTunes may become unresponsive when syncing an iPad.
• Resolves an issue which may cause syncing photos with iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to take longer than necessary.
• Fixes a problem where video previews on the iTunes Store may skip while playing.
• Addresses other issues that improve stability and performance.

iTunes 10.2 came with several new features and improvements, including:

• Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.3.

• Improved Home Sharing. Browse and play from your iTunes libraries with Home Sharing on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.3.

This has the feel that i am in the centre, yes in the middle of the product they are thinking of me and not on themselves.
We have to get the feeling of been cared for while we use the product, this is the secret sauce of the big brands.

Yes i am claiming there is merit to the Product Manager other then just setting the tone of the product and making sure features get released, he has the job of communication to the crowd and mediating the products achievements.
Especially in a startup when we are probably the developer and the product manager we need to keep this in mind when we write the release notes, the client is in the middle of the product and we need to communicate that thought.
We need to remember that releases as importent as they are, unless you are apple and i have to use your bloated itunes, need to be incremental if possible and small if can. a full release of the product is not always necessary if the product is architecture in a way its achievable.
So to all my Startup buddies i call, learn from the mistakes and improve.

I see around the web, guides on how to select an open source Content Management System, though important they usually miss the mark for companies looking to evaluate the CMS vendors from both ends of the trench.
So what happens when you want to do a comparison between ANY content management systems?
Here is my take, based on my experience, on how to evaluate a CMS regardless of its vendor’s nature.
I will start with the commons i find on the web, most of the recommendations i have seen tend to split the evaluation into these topics when it comes to open source

• Web application platform
• Software license
• Stability and development activity
• User community
• Documentation and source code
• Web standards, accessibility
• Suitability and usability

These topics are great! What they are missing is fully disclosing the hidden costs for both the open source and the commercial implementation, but do a decent job.
So what is missing from the list? Allot, Platform is nice but is not specific enough, licences are nice but again don’t cover some of the hidden costs like annual support, stability is a vague factor and developer community is usually tightly bound to the next item Community, and both don’t represent the parallel commercial vendors Professional Services.
Bashing this list brings us no where. Calm down yuval! ahhh that’s better.
Let’s start from the most important factor in an organization, the Human.
Humans make the decision of which CMS answer their needs, wants and aspirations.
I see the process divided into realms representing the people involved in the choice.
There are 4 “teams” involved in the Content Management system, some directly and some indirectly, all influence the decision over which CMS will be chosen

• Direct
  • Development Team
  • Business Users Team
• Indirect
  • Financial Team
  • Management Team

Requirements for a Content Management System don’t match these teams precisely and are in 5 dimensions

• Technical Dimension
• Support Dimension
• Features Dimension
• Implementation Dimension
• Cost Dimension

These dimensions are not separate and all represent the same product thus you get some overlap between them.
Each team is more dominate in one of the Dimension and has more say over it, so nature’s laws direct us in giving them the rule over the dimension they are dominant in.
This is not true to every company and usually the division over the decision criteria’s and dimensions is left to the project sponsor due to cost.
[INSERT RANTS HERE]
So what is the more optimal way of going through the process of analysis of a content management system?
The steps i see are

• Listing Requirements by each team
• Sorting the requirements to each Dimension
• Assessing the proposed products – There are many options to tackle this, let each team do a Dimension or create a team for all dimensions or let an individual do the job
• Meet with teams to finalize the decision

My thoughts about assessing the products is to take each team and assign them the dimension they are good at, this will enable them to be more thorough, the team can be a single representative.
After the teams asses the Dimensions for each product the time comes to collect the assessments and get a score for each product.
Here is a sample of the decision supporting parameters separated to each dimension.
In each of these Dimensions there are decision support factors that need to be rated/graded with a mark in a predefined scale i.e. 1-10 or similar.

• Technical dimension
  • Core language
  • implementation languages
  • Application servers
  • Operating systems
  • Supported databases
  • Rendering of content
  • Interfaces to external systems like LDAP/SOA bus
  • SLA levels per CPU
    • Peak Users
    • Peak Page Views
• Support Dimension
  • Community/Activity rate in the product
  • Clients
    • World Spread
    • Size
    • Since when
    • Versions
  • Documentation Availability and Quality
  • Community Collaboration tools (is it forums/wikis or more)
  • Support product team and availability
• Features Dimension
  • Content Modelling
  • Workflow
  • Users And Groups
    • Ability to subdivide content between groups
    • Groups based capabilities
  • Media Handling capabilities
  • DRM
  • Publishing
  • Versioning
  • Personalization
    • Of content (group based, same page displays different content)
    • Of presentation (iGoogle)
  • Reporting and statistics
  • Search
    • In the CMS
    • In the delivery stages
  • Content Staging
  • Scalability
  • Caching and tuning features
  • Perceived External Attacks Security of the product
• Implementation Dimension
  • Initial Estimation of effort (in man days)
  • Implementation Planning
  • How many features need customization
  • Availability of the Skilled Crew in the market
    • Hiring/Converting existing crew
    • Service Providers/Agencies
  • Availability of integration system internally
• Cost Dimension
  • Licensing
  • Support
  • Implementation
  • Future Development
  • Training
  • Infrastructure
  • Contracts
  • Trial Periods

I have been addressing the issue in previous post oblivious to the fact that it is a growing phenomena.
Now it became even a user driven one when MG Siegler from techcrunch decided to tell the services like face book how much would he pay for a yearly subscription.
I am not a fan of the Pay for a subscription or parish without knowing my services for longer then trial usage, but for the freemium deal i am all about.

As the comment i have made to the post i believe that the usage of paid services with a base price rather then giving you some services and then charging you for the premium package is a wrong business model for most of the services in the web. people got used to the free and like it and are willing to pay for the pro if they require the additional services.
I use flickr and i am a pro member since i saw the value in the service, as a counter point i use the AgileTracker and i am not going to use the pro service Agile Agenda supply since i am not in need of that and i need only the client locally.
Will i be more lenient to buy the service when i require? yes i will do so since their tool is great and when in sync probably greater.
So what is freemium at all?
Freemium is offering a basic or a service with ads free and giving you the option either to upgrade to remove the ads or add the premium functionality.
And no trial of a very expensive software is not a freemium business model nor is a free service going into a pay business model. Oracle XE and SQL Server Express (growing recently to the Visual Studio Express family) are a wonderful example of a freemium business model In response to the MySql assault.

But for services to start charging money at the front door after years of free services? that is just wrong, foolish and wrong.
If you want to expose users to your alternatives you just need to push them and let nature do its course. i am looking for the next free P2P radio client.
Actually i am very happy i left Last.fm since then they managed to expose all their clients listening information to the RIAA and made a nice bar fight with techcrunch denying it.
But that was just because they needed the money… i can lash at last.fm now for ages but lets go the the original argument i am making. if Last.fm would not go and make you pay for a service you have gotten for a small fee of exposing your data to them and letting them rip the songs of your machine. and they used commercials more offering an ad free pro version with ability to do more in the widget world and in the community will you not take that opportunity?
And last.fm are an annoying example since they were using your services as much as you used theirs to get your songs available to other users.
I assume that this was a more appropriate contract then the one they lazily devised in their couches.
Assume that face book will now charge you for image sizes and video uploads making you a pro user for 15$ a year. that will be a reasonable price especially if it came with some more features.
The only problem there is that they might lose some users that were dangling away or the ones with moral standards.
And some of their rivals like my space would get more traffic (although they are number one any way).
But i am sure that steps like that from a competitor will make others follow.
Google will be the last one to move since they are running the biggest advertising agency in the world and will not want any one not to be exposed to the content due to some little fee.
Having said that they are a very good candidate to put their freemium services.
So what is the future? i say freemium is going to be the best breed approach to get users hooked and if you have a good service you will get your crowds hoarding in.
What sort of incentive will be given for the clients to upgrade can very and will be probably dominated by ad free, more space and more features. though i hope to see some more incentives in the features and space then in the ad free.
But it all could be because i admire Fred Wilson and he favors the model as well.
So Freemium it is for me. with a side dish of features if i may.

While reading the post and comments over at Jon’s blog i was reminded of all the assessments i have done for products and all the projects i have met and i started thinking of the purity of the process and structure of it.
My comment to the article was:

*Note* РI work with Vignette, a CMS vendor. My opinions however are my own….but are obviously biased.
I will go on this later on my website but for the time been i think that we need to take the Selection process and asses Adriaan Bloem comment.
The selection process even if it is for a case 1 will need to be maintained by some workforce of the client. so the vendor selection should be at least reviewed by the current team of the client.
Preferably that part of the sales will include some introduction training over the product to enable assessments of the primordial capabilities of the product.
This assessment should not be a Business case assessment but a technical one since the product UX is not available at this stage on the demo product.
After this assessment the client will be much more aware of the products and their matching capabilities to the IT requirements they have. i have seen too many projects been pushed on the IT department as a finalized solution without their approval and making them support something they are unfamiliar with and unable to do so.
The Agency should do its own math as for what product is more suitable for the implementation of the UX and the success of the client and be focused on that.
Later in the process there should be a discussion over the best product matching both the Agency analysis and the Clients departments analysis, the product of this should be a ranking of products.
at this point the price should not be discussed and information should not be available to the teams.
Next there should be a discussion over the price and some fondling with the sales guys.
This will result in a product selection based on 3 criterias:
1. Implementation ease.
2. Matching to clients needs.
3. Price is right.
Now regarding the corruption
Since not everything is money in the world and we are dealing with people, my personal belief is that the Agency and the Client are both pushing for the easier path that will either pay them more or be safer or both.
Coming to see that will in fact reduce the corruption allegations to the ones that are at court at the moment.
It could be that some of the licensing deals have hidden agendas and friendly handshakes but not everything is money.

So what is the way to judge the purity of the CMS vendor choice?
I want to start analizing the choice from the correct timing of the choice.
In SDLC we have these processes when creating a new software:
Initiation/Planning – Generate a high-level view of the intended project and determine the goals of the project.
Requirements Gathering And Analysis – Determine where the problem is in attempt to fix it with a system. Engage business users to define definite requirements.

Design – Design functions and operations and describe them in detail.
Implementation – Based on all the design outputs (documents) build the system while documenting the process.

So where do we put the CMS vendor selection? my thoughts are to do it after you have the Requirements analyzed and before the Design process. but who will make the analysis and who will make the design? do we need to further complicate the business side of the engagements and put more vendors to the mix?
One of the most frustrating thing for me is the finger pointing game we see in many implementations when there are many agencies mixed up in the game.
The price in getting many agencies involved in the process to me outweigh the matching of the CMS Vendor and its matchability.
I wish that many agencies were as proliferate as they should be. their ability to cut the clutter of the process into one agency with one goal and one liability in the process and their vast knowledge of multiple CMS vendors makes them one of the best agencies you can contact.
But there is a risk when contacting a single agency, this is putting all of your eggs in one basket, the risk of them not putting the maximum effort and skils they have towards your implementation and stuffing it up. i have seen some implementations that are quite big and very knowledgeable put their apprentices and not the experts on a project to save the low ball offer they made.

Do we need an external company to process all the parameters collected in the analysis and decide for the customer and the implementer what will be the platform? i guess that is correct if you put the implementer choice right after the CMS vendor choice.

and if we point the spotlight to the implementer choice, what should be the process? do we put an RFP out just for the implementation? are we using an external analysis company to asses the success ratio of implementers and then go by the most successful?
If we do assess the success of the implementer shouldn’t we do it for the CMS Vendor also? and the Agency if we go to the one stop shop alternative.

So what should we do?
I guess there is no simple pathway covered with a red carpet waiting to be found.
I guess that the client should choose the best fitting option.
The only thing i think any company should have is a knowledgeable supervising company/individuals that will be able to asses the progress of the process, especially the implementers progress.

Nearly all websites these days use some sort of Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is a tool (usually web-based) that helps facilitate the process of creating, posting, organizing, and managing the content of a site.
Types of content you may find managed in a CMS include news stories, blog posts, photos, videos, events, and more‚Äîor, in many cases, some combination of several different types. While it‚Äôs important to understand that content management is a people process, not a technological one, there are many CMS tools available that can help. Which one is right for your website?
The first question you‚Äôll need to answer is simple: do you need a CMS? The answer is probably ‚Äúyes.‚Äù Unless you have only a few pages on your site, a CMS is almost certainly going to help you be more efficient and productive. Besides providing an administrative area where you can post, search, and organize your content, most CMSes will handle templating of your content into an HTML. This ultimately saves you a lot of time, as you only need to craft the templates once, rather than writing the same HTML structure over and over for every page.
The harder question is: what CMS will fit my needs? There are four unique types of CMS products that are commonly used:

• Lightweight, low-cost tools, generally designed for blogging
• Semi professional tools to manage content with a limit to capacity due to programming language and architecture.
• Enterprise-level content management systems
• Niche products designed to manage a specific type of content or serve a particular industry

A fourth option that is getting more and more popular is to use a web application framework (such as Django or Ruby on Rails) to build a custom CMS tailored specifically to your needs. As this is a more bespoke option I will not cover this at this time.

Considering your content types

The first thing you‚Äôll want to do when choosing a CMS is figure out what types of content you‚Äôll be managing. Do you need blogs on your site? Do you want to showcase photos? If so, should those photos be grouped into galleries? Do you post events? And so forth. For example, if I‚Äôm running a newspaper site, some of the types of content I will be managing include:

• Articles
• Media
• Quick Lists
• Teasers
• Classified ads
• Users

Structured vs. abstract

What do I mean by structure? Let‚Äôs consider an image content. It has several attributes. Among them: name, date, time, location, etc. If our CMS allows for precisely structured data, each of the attributes will be separate fields to fill in, saved as separate rows in our database. This allows each attribute to be stored, searched, and so forth. A less-structured system may simply have a title field and a body field, where you can enter a blurb like, ‚ÄúThe London Bridge, May 22 1998, 20:00, London.‚Äù If it‚Äôs important to be able to find, say, all photos from London, then structured content is a must for your website. If, on the other hand, you just want to show a list of images you may be able get away with more abstract, less-structured content.
Additionally, structured content systems will often provide the ability to create relationships between disparate types of content‚Äîfor example, a photo associated with an article. These sorts of relations can be very useful, and are usually not available in less-structured, more abstract systems.
At this point the differentiation between structured and abstract is a very important consideration when choosing a CMS. Structured content will always lend the most flexibility and reusability to your content. Abstract content may be simpler to maintain and may allow you to go with a less expensive content management platform.

Lightweight blogging platforms

In recent years, lightweight, low-cost (or free) blogging tools, such as WordPress and MovableType have been championed by many web designers as CMS tools that can be useful for much more than blogs. The reason this holds true is because these tools tend to have a very abstract sense of structure. Web designers and developers have been able to increase the abilities of these tools into being sort of CMS, by taking advantage of their less-structured nature and their templating capabilities.
These tools tend to be absolutely terrific at what they were originally designed for: blogging. When used in other ways, they can start to show their inadequacies. There’s no support for version control and no ability to create content types. Searching is limited to keywords and has no ability to filter more robustly. For these features, we’d need a more structured system.
These lightweight, low cost blogging tools are usually quite easy to set up and use. They work great when they‚Äôre used within their means. If you find that your site is going to be managing content other than blogs, though‚Äîbe wary. You may be able to make it work, but you may also be more well-served by a niche or custom solution.

Semi professional tools to manage content

These tools are mainly the result of great communities that push for a CMS to the midrange of sites. In this category you will likely to find the Joomla and Durpal as the more popular products and some less popular products like e107 and Jaws and even LifeRay portal that encompass some java standards.
The products here feature a lot of the more robust Enterprise feature but with an architecture that is not well scaled. This group of products is usually open source relaying on MySql as their DB and PHP as the main programming language. The main attraction of this group is the abilities that they encompass and the extensions that they offer. The community in the more popular products provides you with almost any wish you will ever have and thus enables you to accomplish your dream.
You will usually see these products in midrange organizations with a smaller amount of user base then the big organizations and with fewer requirements on the customization of the content types.
Content is not structured in these products and the main “Article” type covers most of the needs. Extensions usually supply you with the necessary content structure to support content like teasers and media in a more robust way.

Niche or industry-specific products

Another set of content management tools are those which handle a specific niche or industry‚Äôs needs very well. If you can find one of these that suits your site, they‚Äôre often very effective and useful. They provide the benefits of a custom solution without the cost of building your own. CMS products in this category can be found for many industries, including Health Care, Education, Journalism, Law, Retail, and more. They tend to provide a much more structured-content approach than lightweight blogging tools and may be more aware of the roles of people in the organizations of their target market(s). This knowledge results in more streamlined, efficient products when used by the industries they‚Äôre designed for.
If you can find a good CMS product aimed at your industry, they’re usually a great choice for the short run. However, it’s not advisable to choose a CMS product aimed at a particular industry that your company for the long run since changes in the business focus will usually mean changing the CMS to a more general one.
These tools work great if you use them as intended and not-so-great if you start trying to go out of the box. Flexibility of these tools is usually not so good thus you are like a bird in a golden cage.

Enterprise content management

Enterprise-level content management tends to go above and beyond the duties of simpler systems, offering tools like content revision control, security, preservation, personalization, and access list management. While simpler systems may offer some of these features, Web Content Management systems (WCMs) tend to be far more robust. At the same time, these systems are very expensive, much more complicated to manage. The advantages of these systems are their flexibility and adaptability to the needs of the client and the current infrastructure. If you have a login directory with groups you can leverage it to be your credential system and authority system for the CMS. Some vendors of WCM like vignette offer a wide variety of supporting applications to enhance the business abilities, like Social networking and community applications to enable the application to handle UGC.
The abilities to model the content structure enables you to later on search by fields and make more sense of the content. The content modeling enables you create relationships between content thus helping you internationalize your content in a very simple structure of an article and translation articles associated to it.
WCM systems often focus on structure content, giving you the most robust solution but with a price tag. These systems will also enable you to derive content out of your legacy applications or databases and use it as if it was generated in the WCM system.
These systems will match a large organization that has the requirements of teams of content editors and many features. Media companies and banks will benefit greatly from the abilities of these tools and their ability to support hoards of people accessing their site.
The presentation layer of these products is usually a separate application, usually a portal, that enables the implementation team to create a very robust application to support many business needs like special search and integration RSS feds from other applications.

Custom solutions using web application frameworks

These adventures usually become very costly and tend to require a support team thus not really an alternative to the above. Its only a solution if your content is not the general content and your budget is big but not as big as ECM solution and its customization.

Conclusion

Choosing a tool for your site is a decision that shouldn’t be made in haste. Putting the time in to identify the different types of content and the requirements from the presentation layer will help you in choosing the product that’s right for your site and organization. You will also need to assess your budget and capabilities while considering the Enterprise vs. Semi professional systems.
The ideal way in proceeding from here is to draft you requirements and the candidates for solution and find out which one fits the best.
So  all the best in your journey!

I know nothing about politics. i admit it i have no clue what is the presidential election all about and probably will never know. i think Obama will win but i am not to be taken seriously on the subject.
But why make an entrance to a post that talks about art? well this art is pure political campaign. a very good one i have to say. these caricatures/images are very very good and very persuasive.
Just take a look at Zina Saunders work to see how much you get influenced from it.
one of my favorites is Campfire Ghost Stories

"And then, he taxed all your money and gave it away to the poor!"

Ok this was annoying to figure out so here you go.
I was trying to create 2 axis graph, or chart, in Excel since the relationship of the data was not very good. one was in the tens and the other was in the thousands.
First create a graph using your data and select the type you like. in our case it was a 2 line graph.

then right click on the smaller graph, the blue one in our case, and select the “Format Data Series…”

Then we get a popup window for the series options with the ability to change the series axis.

We select the Secondary axis option and close the window using the Close button.
The graph will update and set for 2 Y axis display.

P.S. the process can be repeated for more lines and more Y axis.

JourKnow a Context-aware note-taking, is an MIT bread application seems to be able to help you become more organized and make the collection of notes information and general data more ordered then other applications like one notes or Google notes.
Lets hope that when it is publicly available it will not be a disappointment.

My issue with this is not that the site is down but that the message on the site claims:
“AdeoRessi.com

The current site ran into problems after upgrading WordPress.

The site is being restored from back-up, and should be online within a day or two.

Enjoy!

– July 17th, 2008 –”
2 weeks later and we are still waiting for the backup.
my point here is not the importance of the website to the world but the failed promise that comes with the deadline.
This is one of our biggest problems in software development. we are human and expect things to happen as promised, but when a dealine is comming and we know we are not going to stand it we never bother to get the warning out and the apology.
Too many deadline have come and gone in more then a few projects where the IT managers never appologized for the delay and the pain of dissappointment.
We should learn to make it a habbit!